Chatbot went dark for more than seven hours for reasons unknown
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Image: DeepSeek
The popular Chinese chatbot DeepSeek suffered a major technical outage today. For more than seven hours, users were unable to access the service at all. It was the longest downtime since the explosive, viral growth of its flagship models R1 and V3 early last year. The company’s official status website confirmed the technical malfunction after access to the Web page had completely dropped.
The outage caused considerable concern among the platform’s loyal users worldwide. In line with its standard protocol, DeepSeek did not provide the public with any specific explanation for the persistent problems. Communication from the company tends to be very limited at such moments, which only heightens frustration among users. According to the start-up’s official status website, the outage lasted exactly seven hours and thirteen minutes in total.
A range of technical complications generally causes this type of large-scale incident. According to news agency Reuters, it is often faltering servers or programming errors after a recent software update that play a role in such an outage. Data from DeepSeek show that the application interface, known in the sector as the API service, has previously experienced similar problems. This specific feature helps external developers integrate the chatbot seamlessly into their own applications.
At the end of January 2025, right at the peak of its viral success, the API service was already struggling with a series of glitches, each lasting an entire day. By contrast, the regular Web page for individual users had so far been largely spared such prolonged problems. Ordinary users posing questions directly to the system had never experienced an interruption lasting longer than two hours before Monday.
The rapid international rise of DeepSeek and the daily load from hundreds of thousands of developers are forcing the company to invest continuously in extra computing power. An outage of more than seven hours therefore affects not only curious internet users, but also disrupts the day-to-day operations of countless external companies that rely on this technology.
This dependence on chatbots painfully exposes the vulnerability of countless companies. Nevertheless, the sector is eagerly looking forward to a successor that should surpass the current generation of models. Although there is no official timeline for this release, analysts expect a new model to further intensify the global battle for market share with other chatbots such as Claude and ChatGPT.
Business AM